Rebbeca K. O’Connor
White Water Ranch lies at the mouth of the Colorado Desert on acres created by unstable Santa Ana winds and set upon shaky San Andreas soil. I knew there was nothing constant about this place, but it had become increasingly difficult to find areas where a falcon could stretch his wings. My peregrine, Anakin, and I had lost ponds to housing tracts, open fields to Wal-Mart Super Centers. An army of wind turbines to the east had made the air too treacherous for most falconers, but I had learned to turn my face east to blow stray hair from my eyes, and Anakin had learned to pump his wings toward the sunrise for lift. For us, White Water was it, our bread and butter, the best place to hunt ducks.
Anakin was already close to a thousand feet high when White Water’s manager, Butch, found me walking to the pond. For the thrill of watching a peregrine use the full force of his fall to claim breakfast, Butch had asked to join the duck hunt. Having instructed the old rancher to flank one side of the pond while I flanked the other, I looked up to see Anakin hit the good air above a thousand feet where it’s easiest to fly. His wing beat had become a quick snap.
On the far side of the pond, Butch crunched through a jumble of brush that released the sweet scent of sage. He drummed a piece of plywood with a stick to stir up the ducks, and a jackrabbit burst forth from the din, leapt down the bank and away. As songbirds scattered above me, I fought dense creosote to the shore where the ducks blinked nervously. I yelled and threw rocks into the water, and the waterfowl pushed away. When we nearly had them pinched off, I looked up to find my bird.
“Where is he?”
Butch pointed, but I couldn’t see Anakin. The bright and boundless desert sky had no clouds to use as markers. I moved my eyes higher and gasped: Anakin was a tiny speck at fifteen hundred feet and still climbing. After all his training, I wondered how I could hope to maintain a connection with a falcon so very high. My hand twitched for the lure to call him safely to me, but Butch stood so serenely and with such unquestionable faith, I had no choice but to believe in him too. Instead of the lure, I pulled a marble from my pocket, loaded my slingshot, and snapped the projectile to startle the flock further. Butch and I ran menacingly toward the waterfowl, and yelled as the birds lifted in unison on powerful wings. A blur of black and white, they whirled together above the dawn like a unified thought, and the rugged breeze seemed overcome by the whistle of their wings. Far above, Anakin waited for the right moment to tuck his wings into a stoop, aim for a duck, and descend.
“Here he comes!” I shouted to Butch. I was about to shout “Ho!” a call meaning game was in the air, but the sight of my bird stopped me. He was plunging straight down, body shaped like a missile, no resistance, full speed. This tuck and fall was pure committed peregrine, nature at its most impossible. Even so, fifteen hundred feet is not a realistic pitch from which to hunt a duck, and by the time Anakin closed the distance, the ducks were hugging the water again.
He had missed.
The ducks made a hasty getaway. Anakin gave chase, but by then the ring-bill ducks were at full speed and my falcon had no chance. With the waterfowl gone, there was nothing left but to call him to the lure.
I got Anakin’s attention by encouraging him to catch a leather pouch tied to a line for a reward. Butch stayed to watch him devour a thawed starling I had stowed in the pocket of my vest. I was truly sorry Butch hadn’t seen a successful hunt, and told him so, but he shook his head.
“Nah,” he said. “I was just happy to see the little guy fly.”
“I hope he can fly here for a long time,” I said.
Butch looked across the pond, gazing past his cattle and the freeway, with suburbs creeping along its edges. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” he said.
—Rebecca K. O’Connor
Peter Lynn
I was tall and handsome, raised motherless in an upper-middle-class home, baptized at birth as a Roman Catholic. I’d met Daphne, who was a half-year older, at a French conversation class and was instantly struck by her incandescent beauty. I was also entranced by her unusual name—Daphne, chased by Apollo and turned into a laurel tree sacred to the god of song. My Daphne lived close to the Vienna woods with her parents in the outlying district of Grinzing, famous for vineyards that attracted revelers in search of young wine. It was, and still is, a dreamy place with cobbled streets and baroque villas bordered by masses of lilac bushes. At the time, Daphne was being courted not just by a bevy of young men but also by a budding Austrian film company that had offered her a starring role in Musik für Dich, merely because of her looks. Meanwhile, she was escorted to every ball of the season and referred to herself smilingly as Queen of the Waltz. All this I discovered while walking her from our first French lesson to the home of a friend.
In the months that followed, I wooed Daphne with daily letters and flowers until I obtained two tickets to the Opera Ball. It was an event of the sweetest pain, since I could not match Daphne’s expertise on the dance floor and had to give her up to other partners. Still, she favored me with a few turns on the crowded floor of the Opera House.
Our dates in Vienna and Grinzing became frequent and more passionate, with kissing and caressing. One wintry night as we moved from bench to bench in a locked embrace along serpentine paths in the park of a former imperial palace, she consented to my plea to make love with her. It would be her first time. Kneeling on the stony path, I swore to be protective and careful.
A few days later, on the night of my nineteenth birthday, I lifted the veil of the goddess in a small hotel in Vienna’s fourth district, and gazed with awe at her creamy skin. With tears in her eyes, golden hair on crested pillow, Daphne surrendered. Like the romantic opera fans we were, we drank water from the same crystal goblet, then smashed it, so no one else could drink from the fountain of our love. It was the final scene from Strauss’s Arabella.
A few months later, on the day Hitler’s hordes marched past the Opera House, my father informed me that I had three Jewish grandparents and was, like him, a target for persecution. The news left me, a political know-nothing, stunned. That same afternoon, I had a date with Daphne at our favorite coffeehouse. As I waited, kaffee mit schlag untouched, jubilant throngs ran by, waving swastikas and screaming Nazi welcomes. Daphne was late. When suddenly she stood before me, she was wearing an elegant spring suit.
“Isn’t it a great day,” she exclaimed, kissed me, and ordered coffee.
The waiter responded with a shout: “Heil Hitler!”
I looked at Daphne’s beloved face but saw only one thing: in the lapel of her beautiful jacket, there gleamed a gold pin in the shape of a swastika. My world had come to an end.
Now, both age ninety, Daphne and I talk on the phone from New York to Vienna every Sunday about what might have been.
—Peter Lynn
October 2007
Emily Ansara Baines
He gets up to smoke a cigarette after he fucks you. You remain prone, your jeans strangling your calves in a reminder you need to get to the gym. Calmly, you adjust your bra and pull your shirt over your stomach. You watch him open a window and light up. It’s still early. He coughs and does not look at you, but places a long, cool finger on the windowpane before scratching his neck. Is this your cue to get the heck out of Dodge? You are unsure how to proceed. He turns toward you.
“What are you smiling at?”
“Life.”
“That’s specific.”
You both watch a sparrow circle around a tree once, twice, then glide into the tree’s dying leaves and out of view.
“I wonder if he has a nest in there or something,” you offer, to fill the silence.
It’s his turn to shrug. “Probably.”
You grudgingly admire him for his tall, lanky beauty. He is smart. He knows music and books, and these are things that make him so colloquially perfect yet so damnably unobtainable. You hate him for being out of reach as he walks from the window and bends down to pick up his shirt. He’s been lifting weights, and you wonder if he’s noticed you’ve stopped. Finishing his cigarette he starts to dress, his black boxers harsh against pale skinny legs.
You consider asking for a towel to clean up, but instead wipe yourself as best you can with his Star Wars–patterned sheet. You have been in this bed for over an hour, yet this is the first time you’ve noticed the Wookie now cleaning your nether regions. Quickly, you pull up your pants. You do not know the proper etiquette for these situations. You were raised in the religion that sells the cow but doesn’t give the milk away for free.
He drops his cigarette in the half-empty glass of water perched on the window ledge. You wish it were half-full. You hear the bird outside fly away, but neither of you looks. He’s not going to get back in bed with you or pretend this was about romance or, God forbid, love. He has never wanted to hold you after sex.
“I’ll put on my shoes,” you offer, angry with yourself for being hurt.
“I’m glad I could help you cum this time,” he murmurs as you step over a jack-o’-lantern and escape from the porch.
“Yeah. You were great,” you say. “Thanks.”
He stays framed by his doorway and glances around to make sure none of his neighbors has heard, then sees something over your shoulder.
“The bird,” he explains.
You nod.
“Well,” he says, shuffling his feet in acknowledgment of your sudden awkwardness. “Glad I could be of service.”
You roll your eyes, dramatically, and he laughs.
In the cocoon of your car, you watch your rearview mirror as he turns into his apartment without looking back. You turn up the heater against the unseasonable cold.
—Emily Ansara Baines
Jerusalem
January 2007
Merridawn Duckler
Religious or secular, every Jerusalemite knows that from Friday at sundown until Saturday night, stores shut, restaurants close, buses stop running. My professor said if I went to the shuk, or market, Friday morning, I’d be trapped like a kipper, hemmed in by frantic shoppers getting ready for Shabbat, the fundamental Jewish holiday that proves even a thousand-year-old tradition requires last-minute shopping. My relatives here, Judy and Gershon, are religious Jews who have invited me to join them for Shabbat, and I have been asked to arrive in Rehovot by three o’clock. Fearing my Hebrew isn’t strong enough to get the right bus ticket, I hire a taxi for the one-hour ride. The driver wonders if I’d like him to pick me up for a return on Saturday night.
“Aren’t you going back to Jerusalem?” I ask. He turns to face me, and I realize at once that I have done something difficult to do—shocked an Israeli.
“Drive on Shabbat?” He says, imagining me so alone in the world that I don’t know what even John Goodman in The Big Lebowski knows: no one rolls on Shabbas.
In Rehovot, Judy welcomes me effusively and promises to help me through the rituals. Since there is no space for me in her house, I get a room at her neighbor’s, who is away. As I lay out my clothes, a loudspeaker blares Hebrew to remind everyone that candle lighting is underway. Back home in Portland, Oregon, people gather on Shabbat around polished silver candlesticks with faces rapt, but here, no one is trying out for Fiddler on the Roof. Religious observance is both more fastidious and more businesslike: Judy hands me two ordinary tea lights, still in tin holders.
Amid the chaos of Judy’s grandchildren, eight of them under ten, I say silent prayers, hands over eyes. While children rush through the house, play with blocks, eat ugot, or cake, and drink from enormous bottles of diet Pepsi, Judy’s doe-eyed daughter and daughter-in-law sit and talk. The young mothers keep an eye out for accidents but are never fretful. If the two-year-old slips, the four-year-old picks her up. Although it would not occur to anyone to have men remain home from services while women go to shul, my male cousin Naftali doesn’t think twice about wiping faces, changing diapers, comforting a tearful niece—why should he? This whole world adores children, not just the women, which is a good thing, because the screaming, running, and cake eating don’t stop until the kids howl themselves to sleep on the couch. Gershon snatches up one golden-haired toddler and puts her on a chair to give a D’var Torah, which, frankly, I’ve heard done less skillfully by graduate students. No one expects any less of these children, who answer biblical queries that would cross the eyes of a rabbi.
After Friday evening services, Judy lets me into her neighbor’s house with a reminder not to touch the lights, because observant Jews don’t use anything electrical during Shabbat. An institutional-size thermos of water set on a timer will remain hot for my weekend coffee. Lying on a bed in a room filled with the wigs of Judy’s neighbor who, like all religious women, cut her hair when she married, I sleep dreamlessly for the first time since I arrived.
The next morning, Judy and I join the whole neighborhood in walking to the synagogue. The women are bejeweled, dressed in long, flowing skirts, their heads wrapped in glittering scarves, faces made up. They wear beautiful coats. A blog I’d read had advised conservative dress, and now it seems a shame to have missed my one chance to dress like Carmen.
In the synagogue, women are separated from men in a balcony with a wooden barrier and lace curtains. When the teenage girls look out over the top, so do I. Below us, Middle Eastern men rock back and forth, a jungle of black-and-white-striped tallit, their voices rumbling like trains. Absorbed in prayer, they hardly seem to mind that people all around them talk, kiss, pass around pages of commentary, and step over children.
Today there is simcha because a young man is getting married. In his honor there’ll be an auf-ruf with tossed sweets. In Portland this ritual is a decorous toss, but in Israel, when they throw, they really throw. A rain of candy pours from the balcony, hits the rabbi on the head, and bounces off the Torah. The groom crouches under the hail. The children, who have been hopping on benches and rolling around the bima, now roam with fistfuls of candy. Two tiny boys swing from a curtain. A child I sincerely hope is the rabbi’s son shimmies up the rabbi’s leg as he reads from a crucial passage. When congregants carry the Torah through the crowd, the men don’t primly touch it with their prayer books. They lean over and kiss the whole cloth. It is not a moment for restraint. It is Shabbat.
After services, men and women stand separately at the Kiddush table, though soon they crowd together to load their plates. Shabbat requires three meals. This is not a suggested menu, but a religious imperative. When we return home, Judy serves chicken soup, lasagna, cucumbers, green salad, peppers, carrots, sliced meats, cooked whole mushrooms, broccoli quiche, fried chicken, crackers, tea cookies, a spice cake, a tray of brownies, also couscous, and humus, persimmons, oranges, and tangerines. On Shabbat every blessing is doubled, so Gershon stacks one challah on another and sprinkles them with salt. Amid feasting, spontaneous folk dancing, and a baby beating time with a spoon, Gershon shouts comments on the Torah portion. Since no one can hear, he presents his commentary to the baby, who regards him deeply, through round, chocolate, Mediterranean eyes.
After yet another meal, the men return to synagogue until sundown. Children hold candles and say prayers for the end of Shabbat. Traditionally, Jews sniff from a box of spices, and such a box is passed around, though there are so many of us that Naftali sprays an atomizer over our heads. Then, bam, it is finished, Shabbat is over until next week. I return to Jerusalem and wake up to Sunday, a regular working day in Israel. Walking quickly down Tchernikovsky Street, I am off to buy strawberries and vodka, in case my professor, or the Messiah, decides to come.
—Merridawn Duckler
Boulder, Colorado
July 2007
Les Johnson
Rather than employing someone to help shorten a one-hour wait, the Department of Motor Vehicles in Boulder, Colorado, uses an automated ticket machine staffed by a gatekeeper tucked behind a counter near the entrance.
“I need to make some changes on my license,” I told him. The gatekeeper yawned in reply and handed me number 581. I took a seat in a red plastic chair and waited. I had spent thousands of hours wishing and thousands of dollars to realize my wish to become male instead of female. Now, after nineteen years, I was finally going to have a license that accurately designated my male gender. When my number was called, I asked for the form to change the sex designation on my license. The female clerk on the other side of the counter looked incredulous, and I repeated the request.
“There isn’t a form,” she replied.
I insisted there must be a form, and we went back and forth for a while. I handed over my license with its female designation, and she stared open-mouthed at the man who stood before her: stubbly beard, broad chest, deep voice. I thought I’d see what she could figure out on her own.
“You mean they made a mistake,” she said at last.
I might have agreed a mistake had been made, and an F would have been changed to an M with a single keystroke, but the truth was irresistible.
“I’m a transsexual,” I announced.
Her face darkened. “Oh,” she said. “I had to do one of these, like, ten years ago, but it was totally different.” She poked the agent on the next stool. “We need to change this to an M,” she told him in the kind of tone used when speaking a foreign language. But the male clerk had been listening all along. “You need to get the form,” he told her as if he were finally enjoying himself. Together they hurried to a space reserved for DMV employees and pulled DR 2083 from a squeaky file drawer. She worked quickly now, with an attitude of importance that seemed to say she alone had found the answer to the question of my identity. I had to wonder why getting an M to occupy the space where an F had been was such a significant step. My birth certificate still said female, my passport too. But a driver’s license, I reasoned, was the identification I presented to the everyday world, the bartender, the traffic cop, to make a credit card purchase. It was important to me.
The form required a Colorado-licensed physician to confirm that I had undergone a physiological change from female to male through hormones and/or surgery. The government wanted to make sure I had what it took to have an M on my driver’s license and, if they ever needed evidence of my gender change, it would be in a drawer at my doctor’s office.
When I returned to the DMV two weeks later with the completed form, I waited an hour, paid $7.50, and got a new photo. Behind the camera was the woman who had finally found form DR 2083. When she recognized me, a smile appeared on her face.
“Congratulations, it’s official,” she said. “You’re an M now.” The camera flashed. “Wasn’t that easy?”
Weeks later, the envelope with my new license arrived. I sat down, excited. There it was: the longed-for M. I tried to view it as a moment of completion, but one, unalterable truth remained: I would inject 200 mg. of testosterone into my thigh every two weeks for the rest of my life.
—Les Johnson
San Francisco, California
January 7, 2008
Marc Petersen
Last Sunday we were in San Francisco, eating lunch with two depressed people. Charlen’s cousin is four feet ten and weighs about 220 pounds. Her hair isn’t brushed. Her face is puffy. She talks about how sad everything makes her. Her husband didn’t say too much. He appraises houses in the Phoenix real estate market. He talked about that a little. He said he’s still making money. Their children are all right, daughter an MIT graduate and an architect; son learning his dad’s business. They drive a new Land Rover, which the woman hates: it uses too much gas. Why didn’t they buy a hybrid? I don’t think gas is her deal. I suggested a bicycle for Charlen’s cousin. Maybe she could ride to the store for her beer instead of driving the SUV. Charlen said she’d never do it. Her husband is about six feet tall and pushing 300. He takes pills during lunch and after lunch. He repeats himself. Maybe he’d like to ride a bike to his office. Where’s his office? Charlen says it’s in their house. So that was last Sunday. The lunch took two hours. We were in a restaurant on Hayes Street called Thanatos, which is Greek for death. It’s a nice little bistro with black-and-white photographs of mortuaries on all its walls. You walk in and see a photograph of a funeral in Colma in the 1930s, long line of people. Maybe it’s a politician or an athlete in the coffin. It doesn’t say. There’s a priest at the head of the line of mourners. He’s got a censer. He’s wearing a stole and alb. He’s churched his fingers. Charlen thought it might lift their spirits a little, this death-theme restaurant. They loved the place, hence the too-long lunch. The woman said it reminded her of a cathedral. “Which one?” Charlen wanted to know. “I don’t know,” the woman said. “Any cathedral.”
We went to a woman’s shoe store after lunch. They had a pair of boots for $600, but they were marked down to $450. The woman complained about her feet. She took off her right shoe. She had flat feet, bad toenails, fungus or something. Her husband and I waited outside. I stepped in dog shit. The dog shit was fresh and creamy. The man said, “Did you step in dog shit?” “I did,” I said. “Will Charlen let you back into the car?” I said, “No. I’ll have to throw my shoes away.”
We drove them back to their apartment on Folsom near Fourth. It’s not their apartment. It’s their daughter’s apartment. Their daughter’s in Italy for a client. She’s designing a bakery. That’s funny: a Chinese girl designing a bakery for an Italian client. But of course she’s not Chinese, and the Italian client wants an American restaurant. We left them at the curb. The woman asked us if we wouldn’t like to come in for a while. Charlen said we wouldn’t. We hugged a little. We patted a little.
I wanted to visit American Cyclery on Stanyan and Frederick, by Keezar Stadium. We drove out there. It was cold and windy. I looked at a track bike by Soma Fabrications, an outfit in the city. Lugged frame, nice paint, handmade. I looked at a messenger bike, yellow, with yellow wheels. Charlen said it looked gimmicky. I bought a new Timbuk2 bag (mine was stolen out of my room in Taos). I bought six inner tubes.
Charlen wanted to walk up Haight Street. She said she’d never walked up Haight Street.
A boy with blue track marks on his bare arms stood smoking a cigarette in the wind. God, I thought, it’s 1966 all over again. Charlen didn’t see him. She would’ve asked me why teenagers shoot dope. I would’ve said, “It makes them feel better.” “What’s the matter with them?” she would’ve said. “Nothing’s the matter with them. They’re just bored. San Francisco’s the farthest-flung point in the country, the end of the line, the point in extremis, after the gold rush. The mythic American path leads here: The city must support both the comic and the tragic. Dope is a form of optimism. It’s a form of myth. Shooting it makes it go faster.”
We’d had this conversation before, in the Fillmore, after Charlen saw two black men slobbering on themselves after having vomited. “Why do they do that?” “It’s just one of the imponderables.” “Don’t they know how sick they’ll get?” “Sure, they know. In their version, it isn’t the punchline that matters.”
I waited while she went into a boutique. People passed me with their dogs and their children. There were some rough-looking characters. They were incoherent; they looked cold.
—Marc Petersen
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